Articles Archive for April 2018

The WB MINIS Project reports that Meeting of Sub-working Group took place in Irkutsk
Under the Mining infrastructure Investment Support Project (MINIS), Terms of Reference (ToR) of Regional Environmental Assessment ( REA) for the Flow Regulation of Orkhon River and Construction of Reservoir Complex (OGP ) and Shuren Hydropower Plant Projects ( SHPP) is being developed, and covers Selenge River Basin and Lake Baikal.

To ensure bilateral cooperation the Mongolian-Russian Sub-working group was established to discuss the draft ToR of REA of hydro-technical facilities’ projects which are being planned …

More statistics on energy development became available right before the Earth Day. Recently we published a post that mentioned the 80% China’s share in 2017 hydropower investment world wide. The figure seemed exaggerated to us, so we looked into all sources available for last decade to confirm the trend. The graph below shows that since 2007 an average annual hydropower capacity installed in China represented 55% of that installed world wide. If overseas projects with China’s financiers\contractors added to that, then china’s “share” of the global hydropower installation goes up …

An article published by Chinese scientists shows changes in fish species assemblages along Yellow river during last 50 years due to dams diversions and invasive species
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From the beginning of the 1960s in China, 32 large and medium-size dams in the main stem and hundreds of smaller ones in the tributaries have been constructed or impounded in the 5,464-km-long Yellow River.
Authors assessed changes in fish assemblages by comparing the species presence in historical and contemporary fish data in the Yellow River from 1965 to 2015. The temporal change in species …

Rivers without Boundaries International Coalition (RwB) and Greenpeace Russia
Submission to the World Heritage Center and the IUCN. April 2018
Concerns regarding implementation of WHC decisions on Lake Baikal and recommendations for the 2018 World Heritage Committee Decision
Lake Baikal is undergoing serious environmental crisis. In 2017 among the good news was revocation by the Ministry of Natural Resources of the mining license for Kholodnenskoye Zinc deposit, which was the major step forward in ensuring lasting protection of the World Heritage Site. However, this is the only truly good news from …

According to the report jointly prepared by UN Environment‘s Economy Division, Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance, and Bloomberg New Energy Finance in April 2018, the share of hydropower in net additions of installed capacity in 2017 continued to shrink globally. The RwB merged the Report’s data with news from other sources to assess the situation.

(Note: "net addition" does not capture 32GW of coal-fired plants and 25GW of gas-fired plants which "replaced" decommissioned facilities)
In absence of fresh data from the IHA we compared Bloomberg figures with …

Mekong River Commission Secretariat (MRCS) socioeconomic specialist Nguyen Thi Ngoc Minh said that the scenarios for 2020 and 2040 showed that if hydropower dam development in the Mekong River continues as planned, the economic benefits to the region would be overshadowed by the adverse impacts of the development.
“Development plans contribute to the economy of the region, as hydropower is expected to generate nearly half of the combined economic benefits from other sectors, but it would cause greater impacts to other sectors as well,” Minh said.
She said that the impacts from …